Khelif is being humiliated by a global army of trolls – including the most famous troll of all, Harry Potter author JK Rowling – who have been questioning her identity as a woman after a match in which she made short shrift of her Italian opponent. She is a man disguised as a woman, they alleged.
Pannu, meanwhile, was criticised after visuals emerged of her lustily cheering Indian badminton players coached by her husband, Mathias Boe. She distracted them, she obstructed spectators’ view, she’s an attention-seeker, she is a panauti (ill-omen), she is unpatriotic – the list of charges against her on social media was long.
As an outspoken woman, Pannu is no stranger to insults from conservatives and chauvinists. Coincidentally, her oeuvre is no stranger to debates around gender in sport. In 2021, Pannu starred in Akarsh Khurana’s Hindi film Rashmi Rocket, as an athlete who was banned from racing when she was found to have unusually high testosterone levels.
Her character, Rashmi Vira, is subjected to invasive tests, the results are tomtommed in the news, while she is not offered any counselling by India’s athletics association, and she ultimately sues them. Rashmi’s story is set in the same period that real-life international medal-winning Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred from competing for a similar reason, and subsequently won a case against the Athletics Federation of India and the International Association of Athletics Federations in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland.
Rashmi Rocket is flawed in many ways. But its positive qualities – especially the centring of a theme that has not been part of the mainstream Indian public discourse – make it worth revisiting while a discussion on women and sport rages across the world. As this film and numerous experts have pointed out, although testosterone is known as a male hormone, it exists in the female body too. The effect of excess testosterone on a sportswoman’s performance is best explained by the scientific community. But what humankind as a whole can easily address without doing a PhD is the harassment women like Rashmi face in the film and Chand in the real world – by society and officials. The criteria being used to demean Khelif are totally different. Going by online commentary from armchair non-experts, it appears she is being dragged through the mud simply because she does not look the part of a woman.
While some have attributed this to racism (because she is African), as activist Kavita Krishnan pointed out in an essay recently, Rowling, for one, has in the past defended Serena Williams – who is African American – by alluding to her curvaceous figure, when she was mocked for being ‘built like a man’.
On the other hand, Rowling is a known, rabid transphobe. Although it has been clearly stated that Khelif is not transgender, the viciousness aimed at her bears all the markings of the current campaign in the West against transgender persons who are being painted by bigots as a horde of men pretending to be women so that they get opportunities to rape women in private spaces.
An individual is unlikely to educate themselves about what it means to be transgender, when they cannot even get past the question of what makes a woman a woman. The fact is, there is no optimum quantity of anything that a woman could be without her being deemed too much or too little of it by at least someone somewhere.
The fictional Rashmi was too fast in the eyes of jealous rivals. Khelif is too strong. As for Pannu at that badminton match in Paris, well, I guess she was just too woman.
The writer is author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic